David Click has been chasing sound from one room to the next for the better part of three decades. The trail starts as a violin student in DeKalb, Illinois, runs through the Chicago venue and broadcast circuit, takes a stretch of touring, and lands in Austin through a series of studios that all led to one room: The Oven ATX. An independent studio, rehearsal space, live music venue, broadcast station, and production house built for working musicians.
The story is not built around a single breakout moment. It is built around showing up. Coffeehouse stages, late-night Chicago rooms, broken bands and rebuilt bands, SXSW chaos, reggae floors, broadcast sessions, long drives, and the kind of education you only get by standing behind a console while the room is moving.
Twenty years drawn one room at a time. The Oven is what the blueprint looked like all along.
Chapter One DeKalb: the foundation
DeKalb is the origin point, ninety minutes west of Chicago. The first serious instrument was the violin. Age six through junior year of high school. Eleven years of classical training under Anne Montzka Smelser, director of Northern Illinois University's Community School of the Arts Suzuki Strings Program. Before a console was ever touched, eleven years had gone into pitch, phrasing, and learning to listen to other players.
At seventeen, the job was live sound at The House Cafe on the DeKalb strip, a venue owned by Fareed Haque, NIU's longtime Professor of Jazz and Classical Guitar and a world-class player voted Best World Guitarist by Guitar Player magazine's readers' poll. Haque taught group sessions at the venue. Click watched the work happen from close range.
That set the pattern. Learn from the real thing, then build your own version of it.
Underage in the rooms being booked, Click was already throwing events around DeKalb. Bands, DJs, small festivals, road trips into Chicago to recruit talent. STOMPKEE, a DeKalb music festival, ran seven years and earned a profile in NIU's Northern Star calling the founder a self-proclaimed DeKalb townie.
Same period: Rising Sun Studios opened in DeKalb. First recording room. Not a polished commercial facility — a working local studio, built from need and whatever gear could be pulled together. It gave the DeKalb scene a place to document itself.
The bands were running in parallel. Astral Guard put Click on guitar alongside Carl Nelson, Matthew Judson, and Jacob Miguel. Nelson, a singer and multi-instrumentalist who later became an audio engineer at WNIJ Northern Public Radio, was one of Click's closest creative partners through those years. The two lived together and co-wrote a chunk of the band's material. Nelson passed in 2019.
At the same time, Click co-led Ourglass with Chris Goranson, mixing nineties alternative rock weight with psychedelic guitar, jazz-trained players, and Danielle Guilini's classical violin. The band was profiled by the Northern Star around the release of As Above, So Below. Years later, after the Austin migration, that lineage continued under the name Starved Rock, a nod to the Illinois state park and the lean years that followed the move.
The DeKalb chapter laid the foundation: classical training, house-show urgency, live sound, local organizing, recording, touring, and the first understanding that scenes do not build themselves.
Chapter Two Chicago: the long classroom
Chicago was the next room.
For years the ride was DeKalb to Chicago to work the city's venue circuit. Three rooms shaped the rest of the career: Lincoln Hall, Park West, and JBTV. Lincoln Hall became the center of gravity. Monitors, lights, front-of-house, shifts wherever they showed up, studying the people above.
The audio-team door opened through Paul Massaro, then Production Manager at Lincoln Hall and Schubas Tavern. Massaro was also touring front-of-house for Mastodon and Ryan Adams, and later went on to leadership roles with Riot Fest, Ruido Fest, Pitchfork Music Festival, and Shure Incorporated.
Click also studied under Chris Gelin, Grammy-nominated former Head of Production and Chief Engineer at Lincoln Hall. Gelin's credits run through Trent Reznor, The Smashing Pumpkins, Korn, Wilco, Bjork, Phil Collins, Daniel Lanois, Tom Morello, RZA, and Wu-Tang related artists. Years later, Gelin recorded, mixed, and mastered Click's single Counting the Rings.
That was the real audio school. Working rooms, working artists, real pressure, engineers with serious credits standing close enough to watch.
At Park West he learned the scale of a larger landmark venue. At JBTV he entered a different kind of machine. Founded by Jerry Bryant in 1984, JBTV is the longest-running music television program in the United States, with thousands of live performances in its archive. The room combined live performance, broadcast discipline, camera timing, quick changeovers, and studio-quality capture.
Click engineered or mixed JBTV sessions connected to Arctic Monkeys, The Toadies, Filter, and James Iha of The Smashing Pumpkins. Also performed at JBTV with Ourglass, on the other side of the camera. Some nights, the session ended and the couch became part of the routine. The point was proximity.
Chicago also opened the underground door. Around the venue and broadcast years, Click ran with The Pranksters, a Chicago house, EDM, and drum-and-bass crew working the city's late-night dance culture. That taste followed the move to Texas. It became part of The Oven's identity later.
Chapter Three On the road
Touring added the part no studio can fake. Click worked crew on the ZZ Top tour featuring 3 Doors Down and toured with Scott Biram, the Austin one-man-band, on a run that brought along Drive-By Truckers. The road work ran across the U.S. and internationally.
Different rooms, different power, different crews, different problems, different moods. The mix still has to happen. The show still has to go up. That part of the work shaped how Click built rooms later. Practical first. Romantic second.
Chapter Four Austin: the migration
Austin became home. The work picked up where DeKalb and Chicago left off: build.
Ear for You Austin was an early experiment in artist-led living and production, a studio with a working garden and a tiny-home setup for visiting musicians. Rising Sun Studios returned in a larger Austin form, drawing bands through word of mouth. By the time The Oven arrived, the lessons were already in. What worked. What broke. What artists needed. What most rooms forgot.
Between studios came a four-year stretch as lead engineer at Cheer Up Charlie's on Red River, including four consecutive SXSW festivals from that desk. SXSW engineering also ran through Hotel Vegas, Barracuda, and Antone's.
At Flamingo Cantina on East 6th — Austin's long-running reggae room — the desk Click ran was mixing The Wailers, the legendary backing band connected to Bob Marley. That room ran a Midas M32, the same console family that became central to The Oven's live workflow.
Among the SXSW shows on the run sheet was a music showcase sponsored by Universal Studios. The bigger story is more grounded than a list of names. Austin taught the rule: a working room has to survive. It has to record. It has to rehearse. It has to host. It has to broadcast. It has to support artists before they are famous, not only after.
The Oven became the fourth studio, and the first that pulled every chapter into one place.
Chapter Five On record
Click's own music followed the same map as the engineering life. Starved Rock records were cut wherever the work could happen: garages, lofts, apartments, bedrooms, JBTV rooms, Hostel Earphoria, and small studios across Illinois and Texas. The Click Music catalog sits on the more polished end, including Aquatone, Cheated On Me, A Sight for Sore Eyes, Stuck in Your Ways, and Counting the Rings.
The discography is not separate from the studio story. It is part of it. Same person building the room. Same person trying to make something inside it.
Chapter Six On the desk
Outside Click's own catalog, the room keeps moving. The Oven's current major production project is the new album from Stephanie Lauren, an artist Click has been recording, mixing, and developing with for the past two years. Her own catalog spans dreamy indie pop with Golden Youth, electropop with Ladysse, and the solo album Masquerade. The record in production at The Oven sits where her atmosphere meets the studio's live-band weight.
Records build over time. The same way studios do.
Chapter Seven The Oven today
The Oven ATX is what happens when a working engineer finally builds the room that was always in the head.
It is a 350-capacity creative production hub in Austin: recording studio, rehearsal space, live music venue, broadcast station, production house, and creative agency. The room has hosted artists including Sara Landry, Frankie J, Daniel Allen, and Barbuto, and serves Austin's drum and bass, jungle, techno, experimental, rock, and independent music communities.
The Oven is not built around a single genre. It is built around motion. A band can rehearse in one room, track in another, play the show, capture the performance, push it to the broadcast station, and keep going. That full-circle workflow is the point.
The 24/7 Oven broadcast carries music produced through the room. The membership side gives artists and supporters a path into the ecosystem before the rest of the world hears what is being built. The studio books recording, mixing, mastering, rehearsal, live events, broadcast sessions, and creative production.
It is a business. It is also a scene engine.
Chapter Eight What comes next
Click is pushing The Oven into its next phase: music, software, broadcast, and AI-assisted production tools designed around the working musician.
The goal is not to replace artists. The goal is to give artists leverage. Faster workflows. Better mixes. Better release systems. Better ways to organize sessions, stems, press kits, broadcast content, and long-term catalogs. The musicians who survive the AI era will be the ones who keep their identity while learning to use the new tools before the industry uses those tools against them.
Inside The Oven, that future is already being tested through member tools, broadcast rollouts, production templates, and AI-native audio concepts connected to the studio's daily work.
The next phase also has a name on a record cover. Stephanie Lauren's new album, two years in at The Oven, is the first major outside release coming out of this chapter of the room.
The public-facing door is the Backstage Pass. Members get the first look at what comes out of the room before it reaches the wider release pipeline.
The throughline Twenty years to the room
Eleven years of classical violin. Live sound at seventeen. A DeKalb festival. A first studio built out of necessity. Eight years across Lincoln Hall, Park West, and JBTV. Tour work. Four SXSW runs from the Cheer Up Charlie's desk. Reggae nights at Flamingo Cantina. Chicago warehouse taste carried into Austin. Four studios, with the fourth finally becoming The Oven.
Click did not arrive at The Oven by branding into a founder. The room got built. Now everything else gets built from it.
On any given week, that room is rehearsing one band, tracking another, putting a third on the broadcast, and hosting a fourth on the floor.
The Oven is the blueprint. Twenty years drawn one room at a time, and we live here now.